[kineticac]

How many emails will you send? You can setup a small server on slicehost, run a smtp server (you set it up) and write something like a quick rails app to do the work. I believe the cheapest slice on slicehost would be fine at $20 a month. Or go with Heroku and launch a rails app on it for free. It might have enough power to send out daily emails using a Sendgrid service. Sendgrid solutions are basically SMTP servers that handle a lot of things like analytics for you. Easy REST API and ridiculously simple integration with Heroku would be awesome.

[knightinblue]

Thanks kinetic!

We're planning on sending 1 daily email to each subscriber. Let's say we want to be prepared for sending 100,000+ per day.

We're currently on rackspace's cloudservers, so we have no problem spinning a separate instance for a mail server. Just needed some guidance in terms of setting up the server and start mailing.

Can you point me to a resource where I can do some reading and educate myself a bit more?

[mschaecher]

My two cents(I've managed email campaigns to ~100k people):

Sending one email per day to everyone is a lot of mail to be sending your users. You better have a really, really good reason to do so--and those emails better provide significant value to your users, otherwise they will opt out, possibly even report as spam.

I don't know what business you are in, but only certain businesses can really get away with sending that much email--ie Groupon, Gilt, etc.--and that is because those emails provide a lot of value and meet a lot of needs. If you fall in the category of a business who can send that much email awesome!

If possible I think it is best to use a tiered, opt-in subscription model. Some example tiers: "Daily Deals Beat", "Weekly Rundown", "2-Week Summary", and "Monthly Newsletter"(these names suck I know). You can present these options as part of the sign-up process, or better yet, when they click the sign up confirmation email take them to a settings to opt-in to the various tiers. This is also good to have as the landing page for when someone clicks unsubscribe in your email. Take them to this settings page where they can adjust the level of contact, or unsubscribe completely, that is right for them. If you are sending one message a day chances are you will have a lot of people hitting that unsubscribe link, and some might not want to totally discontinue contact so give them options to adjust as well as totally unsubscribe.

Sidenote: Mediapost has an awesome publication called Email Insider, if you plan on sending that much email you might want to be reading this. http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?art_type=32&fa=Ar...

[kineticac]

Hey no problem, if you have an Ubuntu box running on slicehost etc. you can follow the following to setup postfix: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Postfix

In terms of sending the mail, you'll need some kind of simple app to talk to the smtp server, for example a rails app that uses ActiveMailer. If you're familiar with rails, this will help: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionMailer/Base.html

Though there are probably even simpler services that can talk to SMTP servers even better, as rails is sort of a lot of overhead just for actionmailer.

Hope that helps!